To Have and to Hold (41 page)

A dozen more hard questions came to him on the endless journey, but only one answer. The red clay hills and the long green valleys were bringing him home, and in a little while he would see her. Certainly they had differences. She wanted changes and he wanted everything to stay the same. "If you think this is about marriage, you're mistaken," she'd said, but he thought her angry disclaimer was disingenuous. She was a woman—of course she wanted marriage. Because he was a man (or was it because he was a Verlaine?) he saw marriage as the end of everything.

But they could work out their differences. This was a crisis, not a catastrophe, nothing they couldn't overcome. They'd compromise, talk things over and make concessions, the way adults did. The first thing he would do was tell her he loved her. In a few days things would go back to normal, and she'd wonder what had distressed her so much. And then he would have everything.

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He arrived home in a driving rain. No one greeted him in the deserted yard except the dog, who went into a fit of joyful barking when the carriage rolled through the archway. "What happened to you?" Sebastian exclaimed, trying to keep the wet, muddy puppy at arm's length. "Been rolling in the pig sty, have you?" He wasn't exaggerating; Dandy was a mess, filthy and neglected-looking, as if he'd been outside for days. "I'm telling your mother. Want to come with me?" Leaving Preest with the luggage, he sprinted through the downpour into the house.

He smiled at himself as he hurried down the dark stone corridor toward Rachel's room. She probably wasn't even there, and here he was, grinning and disheveled, eager as a schoolboy coming to court his first girl. At the closed door he paused to slick back his wet hair and straighten his necktie. But before he could knock, Dandy pawed at the door, and it swung open.

Empty.
Damn.

"Rachel?" he called, in case she was in the bedroom. He wasn't surprised when there was no answer; the suite had an echoing emptiness that told him no one was here. Disappointment felt like a light slap in the face, sobering him.

He stopped in the act of turning to go, aware suddenly that the sitting room really was
empty
—bare, without the objects and adornments he associated with Rachel; no flowers on the windowsill, no book open on her desk, no shawl across the back of her chair. His slow footsteps sounded too loud as he crossed to the bedroom and pushed that door wide open. The evidence was everywhere—pictures gone, bureau bare, wardrobe half empty—but it was the silence rushing in on him, heavy as a pall of smoke, that confirmed his worst dread. She'd left him.

He shouted a ferocious obscenity and kicked the door against the wall. In the violent draft of air, an envelope fluttered off the bedside table and slid across the floor. He snarled at it, toying with the idea of letting it stay there. He already knew what her bloody note would say; the only emotional defense she'd left him was to ignore it, ignore her, counter her rejection with a show of indifference. He kicked the door again, and went to pick up the envelope.

I
didn't lie to you. You asked me to stay, and I said I didn't know what I would do. It's still true, because I can't think here. I'm going someplace. When I know what I should do, I'll write to you.

Sebastian, I don't blame you for anything, not anymore. In a way, I'm glad for what you said to Reverend Morrell. It's opened my eyes, and it's helped me to understand that in so many ways I can't keep ignoring, I'm still my parents' child—middle-class and conventional, the last woman on earth you should have taken for a lover. I hope you think the exchange has been equal, that we have both . . . I don't know what word you would use. "Enjoyed" each other, "taken pleasure" with each other. You've given me much more than pleasure, but I regret nothing, truly, not even the pain.

If you could’ve loved me, perhaps I wouldn't have these scruples. Indeed, I think I would not. But that's a singularly useless speculation now.

I mustn't write any more, I wouldn't make myself clear. Leaving you, the only thing that gives me pause is the thought that you might need me when you come home, because your father's death may hurt you more than you think it will. But I can't stay. I daresay you aren't used to being the abandoned one. And—I think you will miss me. That's a bittersweet consolation for me, I confess.

I love you. My task now, my new job, will be to stop loving you.

Rachel

Outside, the rain had slowed to a filthy brown drizzle. Ignoring the puddles, Sebastian ran toward the stables, with no plan and nothing in his head except a need for movement, industry, action. A girl was hurrying toward him; under her dripping bonnet, he recognized the piquant features of Sidony Timms.

"Where's Holyoake?" he demanded, stopping in front of her.

"M'lord, he rode to the moot hall to see the hearing. About two hours past."

"What hearing?"

Her eyes went wide. ' 'Don't you know?''

"Know what?" He took off his hat and smacked it against his thigh with impatience.

"Oh, sir, it's Mrs. Wade—she was took up in Plymouth four days ago. They said she was trying to escape on a ship! They've had 'er in the Boro prison ever since, even though William—"

"Are you telling me she's in
gaol?
”

She nodded fearfully. "Today was 'er trial. They brought 'er up from Plymouth in a van. William went along to see if there were anything he could do. He sent you a letter, m'lord! He tried to tell you—"

He was sprinting for the stables; he didn't hear the
rest. Panic and the need for haste made him clumsy. He spooked his fast stallion with rough handling, had to waste precious seconds calming him before he could get the bit in his mouth. Bareback, he cantered out of the stables like a madman.

In the lane, rain slashed his face and wind whistled in his ears. Over the roar of fear and the elements, he kept hearing the low, determined sound of Rachel's voice, the night she'd confided to him her grimmest secret: "If they ever tried to lock me up again, Sebastian, I couldn't bear it. I swear I would find a way to take my life!"

20

Darkness. Even beyond her closed eyes, it was dark.
It's raining,
Rachel remembered. And the remand cell had only one window, dirty and high, the rain slithering down it in snaky rivulets. At Dartmoor rain never touched her window, because it faced nothing but the prison's innards, its gray, institutional guts. This familiar room, dark and small and smelling of fear, was a step up, then, because rain could slide down its one dirty window.

"Strum, Jonathan!"

She kept her eyes shut, didn't look up to see the third-to-last prisoner stand and follow the constable out of the remand cell into the moot hall. But before the door closed behind them, she heard low voices and whispers, the hearing room in recess. Time for the gawkers to tell one another what they thought of the last prisoner's sentence, or credibility, or prospects next month at the assize.

Would Burdy unlock the shackles on her wrists before he took her into the courtroom? There was a chance, but she didn't count on it. Didn't think about it. Didn't open her eyes, because she couldn't bear to see her own clenched hands lying across her lap, or the iron bands, rusty black, that covered her skin from the base of her thumbs to the middle of her forearms. And she didn't move, because she hated the sound; even more than the tiresome pain of sharp iron on abraded skin, she hated the sound shackling chain made when hands moved restlessly, thoughtlessly. She didn't move at all, sat still on the smooth wooden bench, shoulders hunched and eyes closed, and tried again to go back to the dark place.

She knew it well; she'd lived there for a long time, years ago. After she'd learned how to form the shell, the dark place had saved her. She'd learned how to be like an undersea mollusk, building the shell one slow grain of sand at a time, and when she finished she'd been flinty and impenetrable.

But she couldn't do it this time. She'd lost the knack, couldn't make herself blind and deaf anymore. Couldn't make herself invisible. She'd changed.

Sebastian's fault. How unkind of him to steal her best defense and leave her naked and soft-shelled, unprepared for her life's newest outrage.

She tried to concentrate on the worst thing that could happen. They wouldn't revoke her conditional release, not for only one month's delinquency. At most they would send her back to Dartmoor for a month or two. More likely they'd return her to the Tavistock gaol for a few weeks, to teach her a lesson.

That was all. Weeks, probably; months, possibly. What was that to her? Nothing. The blink of an eye.

I
must not be cynical. I must not lose hope.

Hope was the most exquisite torture, but she wanted to embrace it anyway. Whatever they did to her, she wanted to face it directly this time, head-on, wide awake. She wasn't that bewildered girl anymore, reeling with shock as blow followed blow, horror upon horror. Everything had come true—she felt sick with fear because this room and this moment were the very essence of her nightmare—but still she couldn't go back. The fear had numbed her before, but this time it infuriated her.

"Mummer, Lewis!"

Deliberately, she opened her eyes to watch the second-to-last prisoner shuffle out of the room with Constable Burdy. Then the door closed, and she was left alone with the matron. Mrs. Dill was her name; on the ride from Plymouth, she'd sat in the front of the police van, the "black maria," with the driver and the male guard, while Rachel and one other prisoner, a boy no more than fifteen, had ridden in the back, hunched and handcuffed in their small, mean, separate stalls that smelled like urinals. Mrs. Dill had watched over her for the last four days in the Boro prison at Plymouth, too. She had the same beefy body and perpetually angry face of a matron at Dartmoor whom Rachel remembered well, a woman who had delighted in inflicting pain on her charges in small, indiscernible ways—the tiny squeezing of the flesh of the upper arm or the back of the neck, the pulling of a pinch of hair out of the scalp. But aside from obscene language and some rough shoving, Mrs. Dill hadn't abused her—yet. Rachel was fully conscious of her good fortune.

"Keep your eyes down, Wade. What're you looking at?"

She mouthed, "Nothing," and ducked her head. A second later her instantaneous, unthinking obedience appalled her. Had nothing changed, then, nothing at all? But she wasn't afraid of this hulking, stupid woman; she'd obeyed her out of habit, not cowardice.

To prove it, she lifted her head and said clearly, "Do you enjoy your job, Mrs. Dill?"

The woman stopped picking at a scab on her hand. "What?"

"Do you fancy ordering people about?" -
   
"What?"

"Especially when they're handcuffed and helpless. Do you like herding them into dark cells? Locking them in and then listening through a grate while they weep with despair?"

Mrs. Dill came away from the high window and stood over her. "Shut up, you. You shut up or you'll be good and sorry."

Too late; she couldn't stop. She'd been a model prisoner for four days, but now the lid was off. She was boiling over. "What would make a woman take a job like yours? Tell me—I would like to know. Was it a lifelong ambition? Since childhood you've wanted to be a screw?"

Snarling, the matron made a grab for Rachel's shackled wrists and jerked her to her feet. "Insolent! Shut your mouth, you hear me?" She gave the irons a hard, punishing yank, then pushed her back down on the bench. "Silence!"

But Rachel felt mad, reckless; she waited until the matron was back at the window before she asked in a voice shaking with strange emotion, "What exactly do you think distinguishes you from the crazy, violent wretches you watch over? The ones you enjoy 'disciplining' by shoving and beating, shouting at them as if they weren't human at all—" She threw her hands up to shield her face, and the matron's fist struck the sharp metal edge of her manacles.

Mrs. Dill bellowed a curse, hugging her injured hand to her waist, breathing hard.
Now you've done it,
Rachel thought with dread and excitement, that dangerous mix that had resulted in dreadful punishments in the first year of her confinement. She'd thought that wildness had been annihilated long ago, by the prison guards and her own better judgment—but here it came, roaring back with exactly the same violence and fury as before. Mrs. Dill's baffled rage egged her on. "Do you have children?" she asked her, pressing back against the wall, keeping her hands up. "Do you beat them, too? There was a screw at Dartmoor—she looked like you. She used to hold a pillow over her little boy's face when he wouldn't stop crying. It's true—she told me. She told me when she did the same thing to me!"

The next blow caught her on the elbow, and Mrs. Dill grunted in pain again, clutching her other hand. She had a truncheon in her belt; she was fumbling for it when the door opened and Constable Burdy called out, "Wade, Ra—" He stopped in amazement. "What the hell is going on here?" he demanded, staring back and forth between guard and prisoner.

"She was insolent!" Mrs. Dill accused, red-faced. "She insulted me!"
Stupid, stupid woman;
she might have said Rachel had attacked her, but she was too ignorant even to lie.